If that's what they're up to, they're doing an absolutely terrible job of it. My primary motivation for going back to school for a Ph.D. was that I kept running into woefully underprepared engineers fresh out of school. They'd never been taught statistics, feared differential equations, didn't understand the physical models used by their fields, and couldn't write a simple data analysis script to save their lives. Some could barely use Excel. To be fair, there were also a lot of perfectly competent engineers, but the incompetent were a shockingly large minority.

I thought, "the academy needs my perspective! They don't understand that they're failing!" Turns out, it's not so much that they don't know as they aggressively don't care. I went to quite a number of "prepare youself to be a professor" talks in grad school at Big State U. Every single one of them presented teaching as a huge time suck and offered strategies for mitigating it. When I tried to explain my motivations to my advisor, he laughed in my face and told me I didn't get it. I finished the Ph.D., but I got the heck out of academia, sadder but wiser.

The academy would be a lot better off trying to do vocational training, because at least then it would be trying to do anything at all to prepare young people for life. You can get a great education at today's university, but nobody cares if you don't.